Life without refrigeration

One thing I have learned in Peru is that many foods do not require as much refrigeration as I previously had thought. Below you will find a handy chart with foods and how long they remain edible in our fridge-less household. No, I have not gotten food poisoning yet.

Lettuce: 5-7 days

Yogurt and cheese: 1 week

Raw meat: 12 hours

Leftover dinner: good for 2 days if reheated thoroughly

Canned evaporated milk: 3-4 days after opening

Butter and jam: forever!!!

Animals I have known

As you might expect, there are llamas and alpacas in Peru.
The only thing is they live at higher altitudes and graze up in the high mountain valleys so we don't actually get to see them face to face very often. Here are some lovely llamas or alpacas (cannot tell the difference) we saw during a recent backpacking trip. As we were setting up camp in the evening they came streaming down the valley in a big herd. Since we are surrounded by agricultural activity, I do get to enjoy seeing other farm animals up close and personal on a daily basis, though. I rode in a taxi with a sheep. Donkeys, cows, goats, chickens are all over town. Oxen are used to plow the majority of fields so we are often awoken by the sounds of a stubborn bovine being lead down the road on his way to work, protesting loudly. Upset oxen sound like aliens being murdered. The picture below is right behind our house.

Like I mentioned in the previous entry, my neighbors have a whole bunch of baby ducks which is pretty much better than TV. Here is the youngest brood several weeks ago when they were at their cutest. They also liked to swim in their water dish when they were small enough to fit (agh!) and are constantly peep-peeping. I will try to get pictures of the crazy fluffy Rottweiler puppy that also lives next door. There is also a full grown Rottweiler who is neither friendly nor mean and we call him Carl.
Next up, the most important puppy in my life: Wookie!!! Wookie is the giant 7 month old puppy of our friends Kennedy and Graham. He was rescued/stolen from a life of neglect by Graham's friend and arrived in Ollanta with dreadlocks and a fear of pretty much everything: other dogs, doorways, cars, fires, pools of water, squeaky chew toys. Today, he is becoming more and more well-adjusted and has actually started rough-housing with other puppies in about the cutest fashion ever. He often runs up behind you seemingly from out of nowhere, ever so quietly (he never barks) and jumps up and down excitedly. Here is a picture of Wookie during that same aforementioned backpacking trip. He is taking a break from careening around this alpine field in pure joy at top speed.

Last but definitely not least is the local kitty cat who has adopted us at our new house. It is itty bitty, malnourished, missing part of one ear and has beautiful golden spirals in her fur like an ocelot. We feed her bread, milk and leftover bones and therefore she loves us and now hangs around meowing and often will spend several hours napping in my lap in the afternoon. I call her Van Gogh. Here she is being extra cute lolling in the garden.

New house

So, how did the housing drama turn out? Very well indeed, and I would like to tell you about it belatedly. As you may have read in the last entry, Noah and I were getting runaround by a crazy Peruvian lady. Luckily, that very same week, a friend here had been turned onto a newly renovated house for rent and was looking for folks to fill the rooms. After being informed that our "kitchen" in the original potential house would not be vacated for "15 days" (translation: god knows when, maybe never) we marched up to our friend and called the landlords to see the new house that very day. Well, now we live there/here. Turns out it was pure luck that the other lady was crazy because if we had actually moved in on time we would never have found this lovely place, which just happens to be two doors up the road.

It takes a million years to upload a photo but I will give you an imaginary walk through. You walk in the front door onto a small but lovely interior garden and patio. The bathroom is in a tiny hut tucked underneath the stairs and it has an electric heater for the shower. (In Peru, pretty much no one has hot running water. Instead they have these somewhat terrifying ELECTRIC shower heads. Water is pumped through a bulky device over your head and shoots out hot, no tank. If you touch the metal part of the faucet you get a shock. Exciting!) Also on the ground floor is the kitchen and very spacious eating and living room. One of the real benefits of this house is that it came with a real gas oven. Ovens are rare and most people pay a couple soles to use the neighborhood public oven when they want to bake.

Back outside, a little stairway on one side of the garden leads to the right, up to the roof of the kitchen/living room which is a unfinished patio with sink for laundry and 360º views of the local ruins and the mountains. You can also spy on the neighbors baby ducks and puppy from up here. Back on the stairway if you go left instead of right you end up on a second story balcony that runs along the three bedrooms. All the bedrooms are painted rosy pink.

Basically, this is the nicest place I have ever rented, aside from some idiosyncratic Peruvian construction. Examples of this include the toilet flushing out a plastic pipe directly into the river, and two sinks and the shower also draining through this pipe which was installed without any sort of gas release mechanism leading to some funky drain smells. We learned the railing on the balcony outside our bedroom is basically just for looks when we tied a clothesline to it and it almost fell off. We added one extra nail and have solved the problem. All the cement for the patios was mixed with too much sand and not enough actual cement to save money so about a gallon of sand sloughs off weekly requiring much methodical sweeping. The front door is about a foot shorter than I am, but I only hit my head twice before learning to duck. The most hilarious design flaw, though, is the wooden stairway up to the bedroom which is not really fit for human sized feet. It is quite steep and the slats overlap each other so when your foot is on one step, your toes are halfway under the next step up. I fell down the stairs and up the stairs only one time each until my body learned to use them.

That is the house. Soon I will tell you of all the animals I interact with in my life. There are a lot.